I was surfing around Dr. Sears� website yesterday looking for sleep hints and I looked up the GER symptoms.

• Frequent spitting up or vomiting (not all babies with GER spit up) - CHECK!
  
• Frequent blasts of crying that are painful cries, not just baby cries - CHECK!
  
• Your gut feeling tells you that your baby "hurts somewhere" - CHECK!
  
• Bursts of nightwaking "as if in pain" - CHECK!
  
• Colicky, abdominal pain after eating, even as long as one hour afterwards - CHECK!
  
• Poor sleep habits, restless - CHECK!
  
• Writhing as if in pain: drawing up legs, arching back - CHECK!
  
• Erratic feeding patterns. Refuses to feed or wants to breast or bottlefeed all the time. - CHECK!
  
• Throaty noises: swallowing noises, choking, gagging - CHECK!

Hmm!

I almost called the pediatrician to bump up our appointment from Friday to sometime earlier in the week � then I realized we�re in the midst of The Great 2007 Ice Storm and it would be nuts to try and bundle up the baby and take her anywhere for the next few days unless she were REALLY REALLY sick.

So maybe that�s one of the things that is going on and making her kind of cranky. That�d explain the not sleeping well and the being fussy all the time � and it�s fixable. On one hand, I don�t want to hope there�s something wrong with her � on the other hand, it�s fixable and would really explain stuff!

She slept better last night.

I�ve given up trying to put her in the bassinet. Seriously. (This sounds familiar � �I will never let the baby sleep in my bed!!� ha ha ha hahhahaha. Yeah, I said that. Let me pause and wipe the tears from my eyes � all of that laughing has made me start to leak.)

So at about 11pm I crawl into bed and nursed her to sleep. Then we slept together (me on my back, to prevent SIDS, her on her side, to prevent being awake). She woke up about two hours later. I switched her to the other side and nursed her to sleep. She slept for about two hours. And we did it one more time.

Whee!

That was, like, maybe four hours of sleep for me. (Should�ve been six � but she was rolling around hogging the bed and I had to keep making sure she stayed on her side � so I lost a few precious hours making sure she was okay.)

Awesome. Plus Blue took her for a few hours yesterday while she was napping and I was able to get two straight hours of sleep yesterday afternoon.

Woooo! I feel like a new woman. Seriously.

I can�t believe the baby is sleeping in my bed. For the record (I have no ego, here), I didn�t even want her IN THE BEDROOM. Blue insisted she stay in our bedroom with us � I would�ve had her upstairs in her crib from night #1.

So it just goes to show you how much I knew about parenting before we had this baby.

(I refuse to cave on the �no TV until after 2 years old� thing � mark my words. Seriously. REFUSE to cave. Refer back to this entry at will. I may cave on everything else (I think I already have) but that one is in stone.)

We were in the grocery store stocking up on food for The Great Ice Storm of 2007 yesterday and Blue made a sexual innuendo �

And I nearly started crying in the middle of the grocery store.

Dangit. I HATE being broken right now. I hate the thought that I might not be �as good as new� when this is all said and done. I�m scared.

I don�t know (referring to yesterday�s comments) if the OB is really dodging or not. My nursing background tells me that she�s right about one thing � I have to wait until the swelling goes down before I can be evaluated/treated. This much is true. But the rest of it � I swear I simply think she doesn�t know quite what to do, so she is putting off action in the hopes that it�ll clear up on its own.